Runco LED projectors Q-750i and Q-750d: Almost certainly excellent, but costly

Projectors are often the very best way to watch a movie. You get a honking great image, with the potential to see a film how it was made to be seen. What puts many people off is the reliance on very expensive bulbs. These never last very long, and when you come to replace one, cost the Earth. Now Runco has launched two projectors that use LEDs instead of traditional bulbs to provide their illumination.

This means projectors can run cooler, use less energy and thus cost less over the course of their lives. They're not cheap though -- while there's no formal pricing from the UK distributor yet, the list price for the Q-750i is $15,000 (£9,000). LED illumination also means the projector doesn't use a colour wheel -- as found on DLP projectors -- and has no mechanical iris. It doesn't take an engineer to tell us fewer moving parts are better.

Runco also promises colour the likes of which has never been seen before, which sounds quite an exciting prospect. We're imagining new bits will need to be bolted on to existing rainbows to bring Nature up to Runco's level of technology. The good news is, with 70 per cent less power consumption, there's actually a chance Nature will still be speaking to us in ten years time.

Runco also offers an anamorphic adaptor for both projectors. The idea behind this is you can use high-quality optics to stretch a 2.35:1 picture without the loss of resolution that comes with black bars. This is an optional extra, and requires that you have a 2.35:1 screen to make the most of it.